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LAC-MÉGANTIC — “What you are about to see will make your skin crawl, it will stay with you for a long time.”

Lt. Michel Brunet’s lower lip shook as he tried to prepare a group of reporters for their first and only trip into the ruins of downtown Lac-Mégantic. The longtime Sûreté du Québec spokesperson says he can’t describe what it’s like to stand inside the broken city.

“It’s emotional, it’s overpowering,” he said Tuesday. “You really have to just walk through and look and listen. You’ll see what I mean.”

Journalists have been reporting about the blast site since an unmanned train derailed and exploded at the centre of town on July 6. They’ve spoken to witnesses and seen aerial footage of the smoldering wreck, but Tuesday was the first time any of them got a first-hand view of Lac-Mégantic’s ground zero.

About 30 of us climbed onto a yellow school bus that day and rode to the other side of the black fence that keeps downtown hidden from the public.

The experience was staggering.

Shortly after being dropped past a police checkpoint at the southern edge of the steel fence, one local reporter began to weep. She works for L’Écho de Frontenac, which saw its offices obliterated alongside dozens of other buildings early Saturday.

“It’s not like seeing it on TV, it’s real now,” she said, wiping the tears from her face. A police officer held the reporter for a few seconds, consoling her in what must have been an impossibly painful moment.

Nothing is left standing in the heart of Lac-Mégantic. The explosion laid waste to downtown, cutting some buildings in half and smashing others into a thousand bits of wood and broken brick.

The tallest structure downtown is now a heap of crumpled oil tankers piled almost 40 feet high. Some still gush oil into the ground as crews work to clean up the contaminated site.

There’s almost a clean line drawn by the destruction on Frontenac St.

On one side of it there’s the green and white taxi stand, a video store, law offices and the post office — none of which appear damaged. The buildings are idyllic 1950s storefronts with bay windows and hand-painted lettering. The one strange thing about them is how empty they are and how quiet that main street is on a sweltering July morning.

Across that line is a wasteland: only a handful of blackened trees still stand. Everything else is in mounds of dust and twisted metal. The smell of oil fumes still wafts across the city, though we’re assured the air is now safe to breathe.

Somewhere in the rubble are the 12 bodies that remain unaccounted for. Police have sifted through 60 per cent of the area and recovered 38 bodies since July 6. They go from building to building, sifting through the ash on their hands and knees in hopes of finding more of the dead.

It wasn’t easy to ignore that fact in the deafening silence of downtown — a kind of eeriness broken up by the nervous laughter of journalists or the sound of mechanical diggers collecting scrap beams at a distance.

The worst part of the blast radius is behind a second steel fence. Dozens of men navigated the wreckage Tuesday in hard hats, reflector vests and boots. Two bulldozers slowly carried one of the oil tankers deeper into the train yards next to downtown.

“This city was built around the railroad, it’s always been a railroad town,” said Denis Poulin, another local journalist. “During World War II, soldiers headed to Halifax would have a layover in town. It was always a major stop between Montreal and the eastern United States. Now this obviously complicates the city’s relationship with railroads.”

By the waterfront, steel lampposts have been melted down from the heat of the fire. The blast also twisted the iron fences that line the shoreline to Megantic Lake and shattered just about every rock by the boat launch. Oil has gradually been seeping from the clay soil into the lake, leaving a slick, shiny film on the water’s surface. Workers in puddle boots and lifejackets pump the black sludge from the lake and do their best to contain the leak with absorbing pads.

“I don’t know how hot it would have had to have gotten for rocks to burst open, but I can imagine it was awful,” said Sgt. Benoît Richard, one of the SQ officers who guided the tour.

In recent years, the waterfront had undergone a revitalization. Until the explosion, it was the site of wedding photos and summer concerts. But Poulin remembers the old days, when he would play pranks on students at the nearby English school.

“They had school on Saturdays, it was right there,” he said, pointing to an abandoned insurance broker’s building. “We would wait for them after school and throw snowballs at them. By supper time we were best friends again.”

When we boarded the bus, I couldn’t help remembering what Brunet had told us the previous day. He said that everyone who saw the wreckage up close, without exception, had the same stunned reaction. He spoke about how his daughter could have been one of the people in the Musi-Café bar during the explosion, enjoying an evening out with friends. The thought gave him pause, he said.

Our driver dropped us off near the Ste-Agnès church just before 11 a.m. and it hadn’t hit me yet. When I finally sat down to start going over notes, my hands began to shake. The feeling was every bit as overpowering as Brunet had described it.

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